Bailout: Banks win, we lose

The idea of the bank bail-out plan was to encourage banks to begin lending again to borrowers to get credit rolling. As the bail-out money is actually tax-money coming from you and me, we would expect the banks to have already begun lending to us…Think again.

At the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton last November, John C. Hope III, the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, stood before a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts and explained how his bank intended to use its $300 million in federal bailout money.

“Make more loans?” Mr. Hope said. “We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

Read the Full NYT article